“But I saw something that others did not see”

November 06-08, 2019

“But I saw something that others did not see”
International Colloquium on the encounter between the work of Werner Herzog and philosophy

The visual and written oeuvre of Werner Herzog carries with it a series of contradictions and paradoxes that have been nourished by the author since the beginning of the 1960s. For example, Herzog repeatedly contested any connection to the German tradition (e.g. romantic painting, Weimar cinema) though his films obviously attest of such a connection. Similarly, he always refused an interpretive and scholarly approach to his work and defended its autonomy and irreducibility vis-à-vis discourses other than those found in the films themselves. Contrary to some of his contemporaries in the New German Cinema (e.g. A. Kluge or R.W. Fassbinder) who explicitly refer to existing systems of thought, Herzog never burdened his films with any intellectual reference. Instead, he developed himself a rich thought, showing through his texts and films that the blurring of limits between fiction and documentary is itself paradoxical: the truth of fiction films depends on the actors’ exposure to the material character of the filming process, while, in documentaries, truth can only emerge through a process of rewriting and radical poetization of the real. One of the recurrent topics in Conquest of the Useless sums up all the contradictions and paradoxes at work in Herzog’s oeuvre: what seems peaceful is illusory. The real is turbulent and unstable – it disturbs the senses and leads to a crisis of the intelligibility at the very core of perception itself. However, the author’s response to this crisis is yet another paradoxical gesture for he chooses – similar in this to the protagonists of his films – to exacerbate the problem: rather than turning to a raw and distantly sober cinema as Straub and Huillet, for example, Herzog engages in a cinema of excess – of the excessive character of perception –, the only way for him to escape the logic of representation.

Owing to its inherent paradoxes and contradictions, Herzog’s cinema is a thinking cinema. It pushes us to scrutinize its unsolved aporia, not in order to solve them by identifying the inner logic at work in his films, but to open them up to systems of thought which are not a priori contained in them. This is why we need to approach Herzog’s work from different disciplinary fields (philosophy, anthropology, sociology, literature, psychology, cinema studies, etc.). For the only way to think with the work is to abstain from remaining strictly inside of it, and open it up to different disciplines. The series of working sessions proposed in this colloquium constitute a first step on this path.

Institutions

IFILNOVA

The Nova Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA) is a research unit of the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas) of the New University of Lisbon (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) and is supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e para a Tecnologia) of the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science.